The Evil That Men Do Read online

  “Maybe you should let your receptionist go instead,” I said.

  “Programmers cost a lot more. Besides, Mindy’s one of our testers. Gives great head, too. You should ask her out. Once she gets to know you she even swallows.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Gil,” I said.

  “Just kidding, man,” he said. “You know me.”

  “Yeah,” I said, wondering how safe my investment would be if Mindy or Alice overheard that kind of remark and filed a sexual harassment suit. “What about you? You’re a programmer, aren’t you?”

  “Not like these kids. They think in code.”

  “So, basically, what you’re telling me is you’re broke.”

  “No, not broke, goddamnit,” he said. He took a breath. “Sorry. Things are just a bit tight right now. You’ll just have to be patient. We’ve got some great things in development. Real game-changers. Trust me.”

  “I guess I’ll have to,” I said. I stood.

  He stood, too. “Look. It’s bad timing, is all. In a few months your share will be worth ten times what you put in. Maybe more. Your worries will be over. But just because you own a piece of the company, that doesn’t mean you can come in here and stick your nose into things you know shit about.”

  “Relax, Gil,” I said. “I’m not trying to second-guess you. You’re right, I know squat about software development. But I do know something about running a business—”

  “This isn’t a pub.”

  “You didn’t let me finish. You don’t need me looking over your shoulder.”

  “You’re right about that.”

  “Gil, shut the fuck up a minute, will you? I knew there was a risk when I invested.” Which is why I hadn’t invested all of my savings in his venture. “If my investment pays off as you say it will, great. If not, well, life is full of risks. But I’m not here to tell you how to run your business. So take it easy, all right?”

  “Yeah, sorry,” Gil said. “I guess I’m a little on edge these days.”

  “I get it.”

  “Shoulda bin a car salesman,” he drawled. “Like my old man.” Gil’s father had been more than just a car salesman: he’d owned three or four dealerships in Montreal West and the West Island. “You know he died a couple of years ago, eh?” Gil said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Nina told me.”

  “Oh?” he said, eyes narrowing. “What else did she tell you?”

  “What do you mean? What else would she have told me?”

  “Oh, nothing,” he said, with what was clearly relief.

  “What’s going on, Gil? Is there something else I should know?”

  “No, no,” he said. “It’s nothing, really. I’m just a little wired.”

  “Anyway, I’m sorry. I liked your dad. I’ll raise a glass to him.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “Uh, speaking of Bird … ” He picked up an iPad, poked at it for a bit, and handed it to me. The screen displayed Nina’s email announcing her album launch. “She’s got a new album,” he said. “It’s what, her second?”

  “Third,” I said. “The launch was last night.”

  “Was it?” he said, taking the iPad back. “Shit. You’re right. Did you go?”

  “Yes.”

  “Shit,” he said again. “Tell her I’m sorry I couldn’t make it.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  I’d have been surprised if he had gone. I was more surprised, though, that he was on Nina’s mailing list at all. Nina had just started her piano lessons when Gil and I met in our last year of junior high school. We were fifteen and in the school band, Gil on drums and bass, me on keyboard. Despite their mutual interest in music, though, Nina and Gil had never got on, oil and vinegar from the start. Or maybe potassium and water—the former burst into flame when exposed to the latter—take your pick who was which. It didn’t help that Gil didn’t score very high on the sensitivity scale. Nina’s family name of Sparrow was a classic aptonym, appropriate to her diminutive physique, and from the beginning he’d called her Bird, even though it was obvious to everyone but Gil that she hated it.

  “Look,” he said. “I’m sorry about this, but I gotta put some stuff together for my meetings. I’ll call you later, okay? Maybe we can get together for a beer or something. What’s your cellphone number?”

  “Now that you mention it,” I said. My cellphone was a cheap pay-as-you-go purchased at the Morrisons supermarket in Fort William. No contract. Basically disposable. The international roaming fees were horrendous, though, would eat up my credit in no time, if the phone even worked on Canadian networks. “Can you buy cheap prepaid cellphones in pharmacies yet?” I asked.

  “Like nearly everywhere else in the world?” he said. “Nope. You gotta buy them from Bell or Rogers or

  whatever. Look, why don’t I lend you a phone?”

  “That’s generous of you,” I said. “I’ll manage.”

  Gil rummaged through a desk drawer, then handed me a phone that resembled an iPhone but was a Samsung. “It’s just gathering dust. And it’s cheaper to make the monthly payments than cancel the contract, especially if we might be needing it again. All I ask is you don’t make too many long distance calls or rack up too much Internet time.” He handed me a tangle of wires, consisting of flimsy earphones, a USB cable, and a charger.

  “No problem,” I said. “Thanks. I appreciate this.”

  “It’s the least I can do.”

  On my way out to Rocky’s shocking pink Volvo I saw a gleaming black Audi A6 in Gil’s parking space. I should have asked him if he had an extra car.

  Chapter 7

  After my meeting with Gil, I took the Volvo to Gordon’s garage on rue Saint-Jacques, to see if they could squeeze me in to have the wheel alignment adjusted. They could. The technician, when he managed to control his snickering, informed me that the tires had pretty much had it, too. I wasn’t ready to shell out the six or seven hundred bucks it would cost to replace them. The exhaust system would have to wait as well.

  Things hadn’t worked out with Gil the way I’d hoped, so while the car was being serviced, I made two calls. Both Rocky and I had limited powers of attorney, but I wasn’t sure if they would allow us to sell my mother’s house or place her in a care facility. The first call, then, was to Frank Gendron, my mother’s lawyer and long-time friend. Gendron’s wife told me that Frank was on the golf course and would get in touch with me later in the day. On the assumption that there likely wouldn’t be an issue that couldn’t be resolved, I called the RE/MAX real estate agency to confirm my appointment with the agent at 5 p.m. at the Greene Avenue office in Westmount.

  I told myself I was just getting the ball rolling. The problem, of course, was that, according to Newton’s First Law, once you start a ball rolling, it tends to keep rolling.

  I called Nina to give her my new cellphone number.

  “Listen,” she said. “I forgot to ask, did I give you Terry’s contact info last night?”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “Are you going to call her?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Why not? After last night I think she’d expect you to call. Anyway, she could use a friend.”

  “To borrow your metaphor,” I said, “a little too much spilt milk has flowed under that particular bridge. Anyway, she’s got Lawrence Thomason.”

  Nina snorted. “Look, give her a call, okay. What can it hurt? Besides, you owe her one, don’t you think?”

  When I first met Teresa Jardine I thought she was the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen, even as she ran into me with her bike and broke my nose—it wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be last time it was broken. Three months before, I’d dropped out of McGill, where I’d been studying English and history, and was trying my hand at journalism, writing for a free weekly tabloid. Movie, book, music and restaurant reviews, ad copy a
nd, using a female pseudonym, advice for the lovelorn, relying heavily on input from female staff members. I was on my way home, walking past the lane next to my rundown, roach-infested apartment building in the student ghetto, lost in thought about “Judy L’Amour’s” next advice column,

  when I heard a panicky shout.

  “Oh, shit! Look out! Heads up!”

  I turned just in time to catch a glimpse of a woman on a bike as she came barrelling out of the lane straight at me, frantically applying the handbrakes. Suddenly, the bike pitched forward and she was airborne, coming at me like a Titian-haired missile. It was fortunate that she was wearing a helmet, a rarity then, otherwise she would have impacted my nose directly with her head. I, on the other hand, might have benefitted from the cushioning effect of her thick mass of red hair. We went down in a tangle of arms and legs. The bike landed on top of us, then bounced into the street, where it was run over by a UPS cube van.

  The UPS driver rescued the bike, and passersby helped the redhead and me untangle ourselves. A pale, anorexic girl took one look at me and fainted. My nose throbbed, and when I put a hand to my face, my hand came away covered in blood. Ignoring my protests, a man in a suit used a cellular telephone that resembled a World War II walkie-talkie to call 911 and request an ambulance. The girl who’d fainted was just coming around when I snuffled, coughed, and spit a gobbet of blood on to the sidewalk. She sighed and fainted again.

  “Hope she’s not a medical student,” I said to no one in particular.

  The redhead said, “Probably a vegan.”

  A piss-yellow Urgences-Santé ambulance arrived in a flurry of whooping sirens and blooping horns. A paramedic pronounced my nose broken. He taped it, gave me a cold gel-pack, and had me sign a waiver when I refused to let them transport me to the hospital. The redhead had a skinned knee but was otherwise undamaged. The bike was a write-off.

  “I’m really sorry,” the redhead said. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I’ll survive,” I said, holding the gel-pack to my nose as I retrieved my book bag, hoping my laptop had survived too.

  “I’m Terry, by the way,” she said. She was close to six feet tall, with luminous blue eyes and a pale, freckled complexion. “Teresa Jardine.”

  “Riley,” I said. “Sorry about your bike.”

  “I borrowed it from a friend. Too bad she didn’t tell me the back brakes didn’t work.” She tossed the mangled machine into the lane. “Do you need help getting home?”

  “I live right here,” I said, gesturing to the entrance of my apartment building.

  “I hate to just leave you like this,” she said. “Maybe I should come up. The least I can do is try to get the blood out of your jacket and shirt.”

  “If you insist,” I said. “Fair warning, though. My place is a mess. I hope you’re not afraid of cockroaches.”

  “I’ve never seen one.”

  A month later she moved in. I was twenty-three, and she was twenty-one, and we thought we were in love. Living with her proved to be a challenge, though. While the sex was great, she was studying business and psychology and soon, when she wasn’t chiding me for my lack of fiscal foresight, she was pointing out areas of my psyche that were in need of adjustment. It was a small price to pay for getting my brains fucked out.

  Then there was her memory. She remembered everything. Every word of every book or magazine article she’d read, the dialogue of every TV show or movie she’d seen. Worse, especially when it came to living with her, she seemed to recall, word for word, every conversation she’d ever had. It made arguing with her all but pointless. Fortunately, we didn’t argue a lot, but when we did it was usually about Nina. She had a key to the apartment and was in the habit of dropping by unannounced to use my Mac, which interfaced with her digital keyboard. It was a one-room apartment, though, and one day she caught Terry and me fully engaged, as it were. Terry demanded I take the key back, which I did, but Nina talked the super into giving her a copy and continued to use my computer when Terry and I weren’t there. When Terry found out, she went ballistic, even accusing me of having a sexual relationship with Nina. It didn’t help that whenever Nina was at the apartment with Terry and me, she would vamp me shamelessly, pretending she was in love with me. It drove me crazy, but it seriously pissed Terry off—which, of course, was Nina’s intention.

  Add to that, Rocky was between husbands (again) and decided my apartment was the handiest place to hang out and send her sorrows up in smoke; my mother was on my case to finish my degree so I could get a real (teaching) job; and Gil Maxwell was after me to go in with him on some harebrained scheme for which I would provide the money and the muscle and he the brains. Eventually it became too much, so when an acquaintance whose name I don’t remember suggested we head out to Whistler and get jobs as lift attendants, I didn’t even wait for him to get his shit together. I quit my job, packed up my old VW Golf, and split while Terry was in class. I left a note and three months’ rent on the kitchen table.

  I sat in the car in the parking lot of Gordon’s garage, the phone in my hand. What the hell, I thought. Why not call her? Nina was right, I did owe her. And what harm could it do? Then again, what good would it do? One way to find out, I thought, as I keyed in the number. Her phone rang four times before she picked up.

  “Hello?” she said, voice wary, as if answering the telephone was not something she did without a degree of uncertainty. I wondered what name the phone’s caller ID displayed. Perhaps Gil Maxwell’s. I should have asked Nina.

  “Terry. It’s Riley.”

  “Oh,” she said, relief evident. “Riley. Hello. Sorry to take so long to answer. Caller ID didn’t show a name, and I didn’t recognize the number.”

  “It’s a borrowed phone,” I said. “Is this a bad time?”

  “No, not at all. But after last night I didn’t think I’d ever hear from you again. I suppose Nina told you what it was all about.”

  “Yes, she did. But nothing I wouldn’t have been able to find out for myself on the Internet, she said.”

  “That’s all right. It saves me from having to do it. It’s not something I like to talk about.”

  “I’m sure it’s not,” I said.

  When she did not respond right away, I wondered if it had been a mistake to call her. I was probably the last person in the world she wanted to hear from. Or the second-last, after her ex-husband.

  “Well,” I said, “I really just called to see if you were all right.”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “But thanks for calling. I appreciate it.”

  She paused. I waited for her to say goodbye and hang up, but she didn’t. The silence stretched.

  “Listen, Terry,” I said. “If you want to tell me to get lost, I’ll understand. But, um, do you have any plans for later? Could I buy you lunch or something?”

  “It’s kind of you to ask,” she said. “But I don’t go out much these days. Last night was the first time in a long while. And look how that turned out. Thank you, by the way, even though Mr. Strom obviously didn’t intend me any real harm.”

  “I suppose not,” I said. “And tell your friend Larry—” I heard a sharp intake of breath. “Tell Lawrence I’m sorry I was hard on him, but I think he overreacted a little.”

  “You both overreacted,” Terry said.

  “You’re probably right,” I said.

  Another protracted silence was compounded by the hiss of her breath and the hollow echo of the cellphone connection.

  “Riley,” she said at last. “Look. My life is awfully complicated these days. I know that sounds like an excuse to, well, blow you off, but it’s not. It’s just that I don’t think I can deal with any more complications right now. I hope you understand.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “It’s not what you think,” she said.

  When we’d lived together she’d often presum
ed to know what was going on in my head. More often than not she’d been right, but that hadn’t made it any less annoying. It was still annoying.

  “Oh, I was angry with you for months after you left, but, well, it was a long time ago. And it was partly my fault, too, wasn’t it? Once I got over myself, well, to be honest, I more or less forgot about you. Not entirely, of course. After all, I kept the apartment till I finished school. But I didn’t carry a torch for you or anything. Or hate you. I got on with my life.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” I said.

  “But it was good to see you again,” she said. “Even if it wasn’t under the best of circumstances. How long are you going to be home?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “A couple of months.” I explained the situation with my mother.

  “I’m sorry to hear that. No intention of moving back permanently then?”

  “No. But you never know.”

  “I suppose it would be hard to give up the kind of life you’ve led.”

  “Not as hard as you might think,” I said. “I’ve lived a fairly settled existence for the last four years or so. Positively boring.”

  “Boring is highly underrated,” she said. “I wish the last three years of my life had been boring.”

  “I suppose you do.”

  “Anyway, thanks for calling,” she said. “You’ll keep in touch, won’t you?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Goodbye, Riley,” she said.

  “Goodbye, Terry.”

  She hung up.

  I put the phone away, relieved I’d got that out of the way. I didn’t need any more complications in my life,

  either.

  Chapter 8

  When I got back to my mother’s house, Rocky told me that Frank Gendron had returned my call.

  “Thanks,” I said. I called him back using the landline.

  “Atticus,” Gendron said when he came on the line. I’d forgotten that he called me by my given name, because my mother had. “How are you, my boy? It’s been, what, eight years?”